of chapter-houses and the less fully developed social life of the fraternities left room for a stronger class feeling and perhaps a more sympathetic college spirit than exists to-day.  The smallness of the classes and the absence of the electives, too, aided the cultivation of class feeling; the classes ranged from forty-five to sixty, and the whole class was held solidly together during the whole course, all reciting in the same room three times a day from the beginning of freshman year to the end of senior.

College singing was hearty and spirited, but our repertoire was limited.  I recall many evenings of blameless hilarity on the benches under the trees in front of East College.  For more ambitious musical performance we had our “Mendelssohn Society,” whose concerts were not probably so classical as we then esteemed them, but whose rehearsals gave us not a little pleasure.  Athletics had hardly a name to live.  Now and then a football was mysteriously dropped into the West College yard, and kicked about in a very promiscuous fashion; the freshmen and sophomores generally had a match of what was by courtesy called base-ball.  The only intercollegiate contest of which I had any recollection, and as it seems the first ever to take place, was a ball game at Pittsfield between Williams and Amherst.  Amherst was the challenging party, and the college by vote selected its team with much care and went forth to the contest with strong hopes.  The game was not lacking in excitement.  It was none of your new-fangled, umpire-ridden matches:  the modern type of base-ball had not, of course, been invented.  Foul balls were unknown, the sphere could be knocked toward any quarter of the earth or sky; runners between bases could be pelted with it by any of the outfielders.  I think that the score stood something like 60 to 40, and it was not in favor of Williams.  It was a melancholy company that trailed homeward after this contest past the Lanesboro pond; but since then I understand that times have changed.

[Dr. Gladden has embodied his college reminiscences more fully in his recent volume Recollections, wherein is told also the story of “The Mountains.” (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1909.)]

Literary Monthly, 1893.

[Footnote 1:  October, 1893.]

[Footnote 2:  Demolished in 1908.]

TO THE MOUNTAINS OF WILLIAMSTOWN

ON THE INTRODUCTION OF THE NEW RAILROAD

ANON.

  Ye guardian mountains of the western world,
  Enthroned like monarchs of primeval days! 
  Ye that hold lofty converse with the stars,
  And bind your shaggy brows with clustering clouds
  As if with wreaths of laurel! ye that count
  Your years by thousands, and your bosoms robe
  With all the pageantry of Autumn’s gold,
  And lull your sleep of ages with the wild
  And murmurous drone of woodland waterfalls,
  And multitudinous song of windy groves!